


A Little Problem

by wandererinthefourthdimension



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Attempt at Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:33:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25814362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandererinthefourthdimension/pseuds/wandererinthefourthdimension
Summary: When an explosive accident with the chameleon arch de-ages the Doctor into a toddler, a very bewildered Donna finds herself in a position she definitely didn’t sign up for: babysitting the defiant, unruly, two-year-old Last of the Time Lords.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	1. Crisps in the Helmic Regulator

**Author's Note:**

> Another crosspost from FFN! This is one I never finished, but I've been working on it again so I moved it here. Let me know what you think!

On the first page of the first chapter in every TARDIS’s instruction manual, it is made boldly and explicitly clear how dangerous a device the chameleon arch is.

“ _The apparatus is intended to be deployed solely in the most dire of circumstances_ ,” the manual reads, with the sort of menacing air that makes people think twice about disagreeing with it. " _By nature, it is a highly unstable_ _device and thus should **only be used as a last resort.**_ ”

At this point the manual pauses – presumably for maximum dramatic effect – and offers up a few intricate blueprints, diagrams and statistics that, due to some odd evolutionary defect and the frankly offensive capacity of their brains, Time Lords are naturally predisposed to enjoy looking at.

“ _Even while not in use, the chameleon arch remains a hazard,_ ” continues the manual under the next subheading, adopting a sterner tone to refocus and calm the reader from the excitement of the diagrams. “ _Its extreme volatility leaves it at risk for inadvertent activation in the event of a power surge (see Section B, Chapter 446 for ‘Unplanned Power Surges and How to Negotiate with Them’). To minimise the threat to one’s crew and property it is essential for the head pilot of a TARDIS to implement proper safety measures, listed as follows. **No. 1.** In order to avoid unplanned cellular mutation or regeneration, do not store the chameleon arch within a one-mile vicinity of fusion calibrators, plasma re-inverters, or any hair dryer with a wattage higher than…_”

Of course, being a manual of Gallifreyan origin, this goes on and on in a way so dull and longwinded that by number six on the list, most head pilots have dependably lost interest and skimmed their way to the much more intriguing subsection ‘ _How To Operate_ ’ where the functions of pokey buttons and flippy switches and cool-looking twiddly bits are detailed. It should come as a truly disturbing revelation that even these irresponsible pilots (who attained only the barest possible understanding of the chameleon arch, and frequently lost a regeneration or two in doing so) were still far more qualified to handle the arch than the head pilot of the last remaining TARDIS in the universe.

Shortly after locating the dust-coated instructions that belonged to his Type 40 – rather than opt to read it by the fire over a cup of tea as any normal, sane intellectual might – this particular pilot took grievous offence to the very idea of anyone daring to tell him how to operate his TARDIS, and in a fit of astonishing immaturity, chucked the manual into the blazing maw of a particularly violent supernova.

The pilot had never read it. Nor had he ever heard of any of the invaluable safety measures enumerated within. But obviously, even if he _had_ heard of these measures, it is safe to imagine he wouldn’t be bothered to follow them anyway. Thus after its only usage, the chameleon arch installed in this final surviving TARDIS had been grumbled at, kicked a bit, sniffed derisively, then absentmindedly shoved up into wiring where no one could really see it: out of sight and entirely out of mind. Its gravity clamps stayed unclamped, its time seal was destined to remain unsealed, its surge-guards were left unengaged – and, as if matters were not atrocious enough, its seatbelt was unfastened.

When this gross negligence is taken into consideration, the events of Saturday morning seem rather less shocking than Donna Noble found them.

* * *

“Spanner.”

Donna pointedly raised her magazine higher, popping a crisp in her mouth and giving the pale upturned hand at her knee a dirty look.

The hand snapped at her as if it knew what she was doing and disapproved entirely. “Donna, the spanner,” arrived the impatient request once more, punctuated with a beckoning flick of long fingers. “Hurry up.”

Her glower drilled holes through the hand. She would have much preferred to drill a good hole or two in its owner. “I’m not your assistant, you know. Would it kill you to get something for yourself every now and then?”

There was a tired sigh. Recently she’d had to contend with a lot of sighing of the tired variety, and it was beginning to wear terribly on her.

“Just hand it here,” sighed the Doctor. “You’re closer than me.”

The only proper seating in the room had long since been overtaken, the tatty, yellow vinyl captain’s chair now inhabited by springs, cogs, frayed wires, a host of tiny gleaming spare parts, the mallet, and what she could have sworn was a Slinky – all which left Donna parked on what she’d deemed to be the least complicated-looking panel of the console. There was indeed a wide steel toolbox sitting beside her, housing the spanner in question. In reality it wasn’t too much trouble to hand it down to him. But she felt like being contrary, so she narrowed her eyes at the hovering palm and said, “What’s the magic word?”

“Oh, I dunno, Chiswick?”

Bristling, Donna snatched the spanner out the box. She aimed for the two long swathes of blue pinstripe trailing across the floor and lobbed the heavy tool at them, in the hopes the impact would be blindingly painful.

The Doctor’s outstretched hand swung in a blur of inhuman dexterity, neatly plucking the spanner out the air before it could dent his shins.

“Thank you.”

She didn't reply.

And such had been the frosty atmosphere in the TARDIS for a fortnight, ever since the unfortunate visit to Midnight.

Donna was all too aware that the Doctor was susceptible to dark, turbulent mood swings. But those brief episodes of sourness didn’t hold a candle to what she had experienced over the last two weeks. His maddening enthusiasm, his fascination with every little thing there was to be fascinated by, his humour and recklessness and zeal for exploration – qualities which usually outlived even the foulest of strops – it was all gone. Everything positive that normally compensated for the odd mood swing had completely evaporated in the wake of the harrowing experience on that space bus.

All he had done, for fourteen whole days, was lay under the console and 'repair' things. In silence.

It was the mother of all sulks. In the past, even whilst he was in one of his moods, his gob still always had a mind of its own. He was an innately talkative bloke: physically incapable of lasting thirty minutes without rambling to himself or blurting out an idea for a trip or sharing a useless obscure factoid. Now the only time she heard him speak unprompted was when he asked her to fetch something out of that bloody toolbox.

She'd never once thought it possible that she would actually _miss_ the sound of the Doctor’s endless rambles, but as barmy as it was, she did. She missed him hovering far too closely at her shoulder and making withering remarks about her habit of reading rubbish tabloids, missed hearing him shout at his ship and grumble to her about fluid links as if she had the faintest clue what he was going on about, missed telling him to shut up when he waffled for hours about tree planets and ice planets and vegan planets and all other sorts of nonsense places. And, in a way, she felt responsible for his decline into silence, having made the regrettable (albeit one-hundred percent justifiable) decision to lounge poolside and sip cocktails rather than accompany him on the bus.

So for the first week, Donna – knowing that he was working through the trauma from the incident on Midnight – had made a genuine effort to stay calm and supportive. But come the second week the urge to shout sense into him became too great. Traumatised or not, his behaviour was properly absurd. He didn't eat, didn’t sleep. She'd not even seen him get up to go to the loo once. He refused to discuss what’d happened on Midnight, even though it was painfully evident how much the ordeal had disturbed him. When she tried, loudly, to convince him to at the very least take better care of himself, the only response she ever received was an invariably tired, invariably sighed, “I'm fine, Donna.”

She had no idea how to handle this stratum of despondence. Yelling – her usual recourse – had proven ineffective. And she was worried. The Doctor being quiet and morose was like Donna suddenly becoming even-tempered and mastering subtlety; it was an unsettling notion no matter how you looked at it. The man had the universe's most ridiculously expressive face. It was a face meant to lift into twinkling grins or scrunch in confusion or narrow into that disapproving teacher look he gave her sometimes. Seeing that face so distant and blank just felt wrong. It was impossible to decipher what emotions, if any, were clouding his mind. At least if he’d been engaging in his typical broody routine of snapping at her to leave him be and let him work, she’d have some clue that he was trying to cope. But he didn’t snap. He didn’t emote. He didn’t do anything that didn’t involve the console, the sonic, heavy sighing, and an occasional spanner.

Nevertheless, she comforted herself with the thought that it couldn’t go on forever. Fate would intervene. The Earth would be imperilled again at some point. Aliens seemed very insistent upon invading/harvesting/obliterating her home planet, after all. Once they made another attempt, then he'd have no choice but to emerge from under that console and make himself useful. And once he’d thrown himself back into the fray, into the action, he would remember how much he liked it, and he would come out of the nasty depression – or whatever the hell it was – he’d descended into.

She just needed to be patient. _Something_ , she thought, had to eventually happen to change his mindset.

What she did not know was that this something was destined to occur in a mere one hundred and eighteen seconds.

Both occupants of the ship, completely unaware of what would happen in approximately two minutes, had re-engaged in their own respective activities. The Doctor murmured softly to himself about dust, sniffed a little, and lapsed into more silence. Peeved that all he seemed to care about was the state of the bottom of the console – not even the most interesting side – Donna returned to the rigorous pastime of feigning indifference towards his wellbeing, flicking absently through her magazine as she tossed another crisp in her mouth and crunched on the snack.

It was at this single crucial moment that, unbeknownst to her, small, microscopic particles spewed from the surface of the poor crisp as soon as her teeth cracked into it. These particles hurtled down towards a remarkably delicate slot on the console at top speed, bearing the faintest hint of salt and grease and potato.

Nothing happened, obviously.

Then the Doctor's mutterings about dust finally came to fruition as he proceeded to drop his spanner and let out an enormous sneeze.

This jarringly loud _clang_ and “ _achoo_ ” combination, erupting as it did from right under her perch, sent Donna leaping in surprise. Her bag of crisps leapt with her, crinkling as her fist tightened on it. Nearly the entire bag sloshed out onto her lap and onto the console: right down into that delicate slot.

The result was spectacular.

There was a violent, sizzling, red-hot spark and a resounding shout that put the sneeze to shame. Long limbs scrabbled, frantic, as the Doctor rushed to sit up. His forehead smacked dully against the underbelly of the smoking console and he went tumbling right back down with a grunt, ending up sprawled awkwardly on his side, looking besieged and bearing a sudden strong resemblance to a cat startled by fireworks. “What?” he spluttered, eyes bulging, swatting at the smoke. “ _What_?”

Reflexively, Donna almost started to point and laugh, but a column of scalding smoke surged out the top of the console, scorching her shirt and sending her flying off the controls with an affronted squeak. A larger, even angrier collection of sparks spewed from where she’d been perched a second ago. Overhead a klaxon began to whine.

Something that looked very important exploded.

The next few moments melded into a hazy montage of madness. The Doctor grumbled something furious under his breath, got to his feet, and pushed past her to start throwing levers. The room bucked, heat billowing, sparks sailing, tendrils of white flame lashing out the seams of the console. Two new alarms wailed in discordant harmony with the first, fighting tooth and nail to out-screech the ambient destruction around them: rubble crunching, walls rattling, floor heaving, glass bursting. And then, all of a sudden, surrounded by all that frightening, frantic chaos – the Doctor froze.

“ _You've dribbled crisps in_ _the helmic regulator!_ ”

It was, Donna realised with immense satisfaction, the most emotive he'd been since Midnight.

“Well, _sorry_ ,” she offered, not feeling very sorry in the slightest, trying not to be pleased at the tight anger he was so clearly trying to keep off his face. “Didn't mean to. And it's _your_ fault I spilled them, anyway. Who in the world sneezes like that?”

“What have I told you,” he shouted, voice rising to eclipse all three of the klaxons as he hurled the empty, incriminating greasy packet at the floor, “about eating in the console room?”

She was about to snap back that he'd once lectured her for eating ice cream near his precious console – nothing at all had been said about crisps, so she was technically innocent, thank you very much – but before she could retort, the TARDIS jolted, tossing both its passengers to the floor. A floor which, Donna couldn't help but notice, was beginning to tilt the wrong way.

“The gravitational circuits are failing!” The Doctor struggled to get back to the controls. “Hold onto something!” he yelled over his shoulder.

This seemed like a reasonable course of action, so she hastily grabbed the nearby railing. The Time Lord across the room was a frenzied blur, clutching the coral edge of the console as he twisted dials and jabbed buttons in a fruitless bid to control his vehicle. The floor lurched fully sideways. Donna yelped as her feet slipped off the grating, knuckles turning white as her legs dangled. She found herself staring across the room at a messy tangle of black looping wires. It took her a moment to realise, with belated alarm, that it was exactly what the ceiling looked like.

Metal stretched and screeched and rolled. The Doctor’s livid mutterings grew progressively more colourful-sounding. One red Converse was planted up on the console, braced on the handbrake, as the other struggled to find purchase. He was beginning to slip. She closed her eyes and clung to the railing for dear life.

The room somersaulted.

It all seemed like somewhat of an overreaction to crisps, in Donna's opinion.

She lost her grip and fell, screaming. The junk on the bench seat clattered off and fell with her. Even the Doctor’s long coat fell, slipping from its home thrown over a coral strut and billowing out like an empty cape as it sank downward. Unlike the other objects in plunging transit, however, Donna’s impact was cushioned unexpectedly: the fall broken by an unidentified cold and bony object.

“Ow!” it wheezed. “Donna!”

“What happened?” she demanded, scrambling off lanky alien and into the hard rubber blanket of wires. She sat up and looked around anxiously – finding the room plunged into a vast, abrupt darkness, the Time Rotor glowing a soft and sickly aqua into dense shadow.

“The gravity failed.” He sounded reasonably upset about it, so Donna made the educated assumption that this wasn’t a good thing. “High-voltage power surge must have short-circuited the mainframe, caused an automatic shutdown. The TARDIS’s internal dimensions destabilised. Without her own to stay buoyant, she must have been dragged to the nearest centre of gravity.”

“Which is?”

“A planet, odds are.”

“Which one?”

“Well, let me just have a look at the monitor.” His eyes widened comically and lifted upwards to where the console now resided. “Oh, _wait._ ”

She glared. “Look, I said I was sorry. Are we stuck up here?” She paused. “I mean, down here.”

“Yeah, just a _bit_ , Donna. The door's several metres above your head, in case you haven’t noticed.” He probed gingerly at his ribcage, winced, then let out a mighty sigh and flopped back into the wires, pressing a frustrated hand over his eyes. “ _Crisps_ ,” he huffed. “Unbelievable. Tell them not to wander off, tell them not to talk to strangers, tell them not to eat in the console room – and what happens? I don't know why I even bother, I don’t.”

She ignored the rant, squinting at him in the dark and frowning at the presence of a few unpleasant-looking injuries. There was a bruise swelling over his eyebrow, a smear of soot on his cheek, and the shiny raw graze of a burn mark on his jaw where the heat of the flaring console had singed him. Donna felt a bit contrite then, and wanted to ask if he was all right; but something told her he wouldn’t appreciate her sympathy just now. She sat back on her heels, glancing around once more. That was when it caught her attention.

“Uh…Doctor?”

“Hmm?” he grunted. “You planning on wrecking my TARDIS again?”

“No, there's a…well, whatever that thing right there is. Is it supposed to be…fizzling like that?”

“Fizzling?” He peeked through his fingers, then dropped his hand all the way. “What's fizzling?” Frowning, he sat upright and turned around. Donna pointed a finger to direct his questioning gaze to the helmet-like device resting a few feet away.

Small white veins of electricity were slithering along domed metal. The light crackled and jerked, bright and disjointed, spitting up tiny wisps of steam. And then, conveniently – as if it’d just been waiting to get their attention – the electricity began to slither up the long cord that branched from the top of the odd helmet, letting out a very soft, very deadly-sounding hiss.

The Doctor stiffened.

Before Donna could form the words to ask him what’d gone wrong now, one hundred and sixty odd pounds of Time Lord bowled her over.

Her eyes flew wide in shock, and she instantly, furiously struggled, indignant. “Oi! Off!” She felt his knees clamp tight on either side of her hips, and his chest pressed into her back as he hunched over her. “Get off me, Dumbo!”

The explosion, as explosions went, was absolutely deafening.


	2. The Birds Sensed It Coming

Donna groaned herself back into the world. As the ringing in her ears died, it fell jarringly quiet. The console room floated into dark, smoke-smudged focus – turned from shadowy blue-green to an appropriately ominous dire red.

She rolled onto her back, coughed, probed at a painful sear on her neck, and wondered, not for the first time, why she’d ever wanted to leave Chiswick. Then she remembered her mother, and sighed.

Then she remembered the Doctor, and sat up so quickly she almost got whiplash.

“Doctor?” The startling weight that’d held her down was now terribly evident in its absence. She scrambled onto her knees and sought a long-limbed figure in the hazy smog. “Doctor!” she shouted again, staggering to her feet. Frantically she whipped her head around, stumbling, scanning the wires around her for any sign of a body.

There was something soft and unexpected underfoot. Donna stilled, looking down. Her eyes picked out a formless lump in the darkness. 

Beneath her shoe were the Doctor’s clothes: stacked up in a mound and decidedly void of their owner.

For several long moments her brain stubbornly refused to accept the logical conclusion that it was being offered. She knelt down slowly, numbness prickling along her spine, and poked at the singed pinstriped jacket. The slightly wrinkled fabric carried the faintest ghost of body heat – just enough to suggest a living person had probably been in it in the not-distant past.

Two impulses came to her then, but she ignored both. Panicking was a waste of time and crying was entirely out of the question (if there was an afterlife, she sure as hell couldn’t risk letting him see her weep into his jacket – he’d get a big head about it and probably spend eternity bringing it up). Donna swallowed hard, and forcefully made a point to keep her composure. She prodded at one flat lapel. She rifled in his pocket, found a cherry lollipop and the sonic screwdriver, deemed them both useless and stuffed them back in. She tried to make sense of what was happening, but that proved a futile task, so she stopped.

Chiswick was seeming like more and more of an appealing alternative with every passing second, which more than anything spoke to the absolute horror of her current circumstances.

“All right,” she whispered to herself, supportively, thinking hard about what to do next. Nothing relevant occurred to her. She repeated the words a bit louder – not because she felt it would help to shake an idea loose, but because being loud just generally made her feel better, more in control.

Coincidentally, though, being loud was an unintentionally excellent plan.

At the sound of her elevated voice, something wriggled in his discarded shirt.

Donna prided herself on not screaming. She let out a very respectable squawk of surprise and recoiled sharply, losing her balance, falling onto her rear.

The thing in the shirt continued to stir. Uncoordinated, it bobbled upwards, then went back down, then halted uncertainly. Donna watched it for a terrified second, waiting for some unnamed terror to jump out and maul her horribly – but when nothing else happened for a while, the threat of mauling seemed less likely. After a few more seconds she worked up the courage to reach towards the shirt. “Hello?” she called warily.

It bobbled again. Holding her breath, she undid the first button. The thing in the shirt rotated around in a hesitant, disorientated circle. She pulled another button loose. The neck of the shirt slouched downward.

A small head of ruffled brown poked out the collar.

Donna felt her mouth fall open. “Doctor?” she demanded, heart in her throat.

The head, baffled, swivelled in her direction. She clambered closer, grabbed the shoulders of the shirt, gave them a solid tug – and froze under the abrupt curious scrutiny.

There was a boy of no older than two staring at her. Sitting right in front of her, pale and small, eyes dark and large. His face was dusted in soot. Above his right eyebrow – a distinctly familiar, distinctly unruly eyebrow – swelled an impressive bruise. On his jaw shone a raw, stingingly red blister.

“Oh my God,” Donna breathed. “No _way_.”

She had seen plenty of bizarre things whilst travelling with the Doctor – colossal spiders and volcano people and carnivorous shadows – but hands down, this took the biscuit.

Gaze owlish in the low light, the toddler observed her with a still, wary, chubby-faced apprehension. Every inch of him was swamped by the light blue button-down that had once fit perfectly, swallowing him up like a dress eight sizes too big. One long sleeve limply dangled over his little fist when he brought it up to rub at his eyes.

Donna was reeling.

“You’re the Doctor, aren’t you?”

He put the end of his sleeve in his mouth and chewed on it, which as it turned out was exceptionally difficult to interpret as a yes or no.

“Oh my God,” blurted Donna again, because the realisation had just begun to sink more firmly into her brain and her brain wanted nothing at all to do with it. “You’re _the Doctor_.”

There was no sign of recognition at the name. He kept blinking those unreasonably round eyes and gnawing tentatively at his sleeve, watching her.

Moving as though she was in a trance, Donna reached out to poke the kid's shoulder – just to make sure it was real, and she wasn't actually concussed from her fall, stuck in a deranged dreamland of her own mind's creation. Unfortunately, he was tangible. And he reacted to the slight contact as if he’d been struck, jumping sharply, shying away.

“You’re a little kid,” she wondered, head shaking in disbelief. “But that’s _impossible_. How…?”

He offered little in the way of explanation, descending into his shirt, pulling up on the collar to hide half his face. The big brown eyes peered out at her distrustfully.

Donna’s stomach took this moment to begin to twist and coil itself into tight, hard knots of anxiety as she looked at the boy.

“You have to change yourself back,” she told him.

He continued to peer, unconvinced.

“I mean, _you_ must be in there somewhere,” she tried to reason. “That _fizzly_ thing, whatever it did…” Donna hurried to her feet and retrieved the fizzly thing in question, where it rested a few feet away gleaming and flawlessly intact despite the massive explosion it’d triggered. She put the helmet down in front of him, settling her hands on her hips. “I bet you know how to undo it, reverse it, somehow. Go on,” she insisted, moving closer and flapping her hands at him, “take a look at it.”

He flinched – whether in response to the presence of the explosive helmet-device or the similarly terrifying image of Donna looming over him, it was not certain – and drew his knees up, wilting into a little ball of shirt, very pointedly not taking a look at it.

Donna felt dread, sickly and nauseating, wash over her. “Doctor, come on.”

The toddler remained a resolute lump of uncooperative menswear.

“We’ll never get out of here,” she realised slowly, fretfully. “We’ll be stuck down here for weeks. _Months._ ” There was a whimper from the shirt. “No one will know to look…and that’s if this planet's even got _people_ on it. We could spend years down here. No light, no food, no…wait. Oh, God, we’ll starve to death first.”

This string of despairing concerns would have perhaps gone over better had she not actually voiced it aloud. Huddled inside his shirt, the Doctor burst into tears.

At the exact same moment, rather unhelpfully, something began to pound on the TARDIS door.

* * *

It was the only kind of morning London had ever proved capable of producing: cold, soggy, in a depressing shade of grey. Traffic beeped and burbled lowly. Voices drifted, birds twittered anxiously, horns honked. The faint sounds of living, breathing, overcast city floated on a bitter wind.

Then, with absolutely no regard for the agreeable and politely civilised hush, a projectile decided to slam furiously through the stratosphere.

The boom was deafening, splitting, a thunderclap slamming through the air with deep rippling power. Bloated rainclouds tore apart as the projectile hurtled through. The birds, who’d sensed it coming all along, cheered at the fantastic spectacle in a chorus of excited chirps: all of which could be loosely translated into, “Hey, you guys seeing this too?”

And the human race was indeed seeing it. Bikers stopped biking, cab drivers looked up in awe, and even obnoxiously stuffy businessmen – the sort who talked urgently into expensive smartphones and made a point of always looking as though they were in some dire all-important rush – dragged their attention skyward in slow shock.

There was a police telephone box streaking scandalously through the heavens, on fire, sketching a grand trail of murky blazing black across the grey, and it seized the interest of every living creature within viewing distance.

Once it was done stealing the show, the box plunged down to disappear behind the horizon. The Earth quivered wearily with the force of impact. London recovered neatly from its shock, unanimously agreed to pretend it hadn’t seen anything – and if it had, which it most assuredly hadn’t, whatever it’d seen was certainly none of its business – and carried on as it always did, bustling and grumbling.

On a sleepy street below a happy murder of crows who were loudly regaling each other with tales of how magnificent the morning’s show had been, one very stunned Sylvia Noble stumbled outside in her dressing gown and curlers. She batted the smoke away from her face, stared at the crater in her backyard, and saw red.


	3. The Military Ruins Everything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because obviously you can't crash the TARDIS in Season 4 without some specific people noticing :) This is the first chapter I've written for this story since I last worked on it 2 years ago - please let me know if I've still got the tone of it right! Thank you for reading!

In a top-secret base tucked away somewhere barren and remote, a group of people whose sole responsibility was to fret over UFOs were, in a predictable turn of events, fretting.

By all accounts, the security of this top-secret base was supposed to be absolute. It loomed, like the sort of place that, despite the lack of a ‘No Trespassing’ sign, you’d be shot from long distance for even thinking about trying to trespass on. Lofty, viciously barbed gates rose glinting and hostile around the complex. At the lone entrance anyone looking to intrude would be met with an armed guard, as well as an exciting array of high-tech deterrents pilfered from aliens: un-hackable ID chip-readers, retina, fingerprint and saliva scanners, detailed facial recognition, and dental record verification. With the addition of an invisible domed forcefield and underground landmines activated by unrecognised bio-data, the base possessed the tightest security in the Milky Way. They were tremendously proud of this achievement. So proud of it, indeed, that they felt entirely comfortable having a black van parked out front with the letters U.N.I.T emblazoned proudly on its side in chipped metallic paint.

However, it is probably worth mentioning that outside of the sparsely populated Milky Way – derogatorily known to some unmentioned species as Mutter’s Spiral – such security was laughable, the defence equivalent of putting a chair under a doorknob and praying. Any visitor from outside this galaxy would have no problem whatsoever intruding. Which explained away, quite well, all the smoking chaos, and why there was a group of analysts trotting around a central UNIT building as it burned bright against the drab English sky, and, most pressingly, how their nifty forcefield had failed so epically in keeping out one little police telephone box.

A dreary rain had begun to fall. Human-sized figures in red berets ran around outside with big guns, looking flustered and unsure of what to shoot at. Orders were barked from multiple directions, most of them contradictory. Ammunition was being tossed about and grappled for and fumbled, the soldiers looking rather like children fanatically rushing to rescue the sweets from a busted piñata.

Accordingly, Colonel Alan Mace had an absolute bitch of a headache.

“Colonel,” he heard, shouted at him in a breathless rush. With some difficulty, he pulled his harried mind away from how precisely he was going to justify these increasingly bizarre insurance claims to the government, shook off the sight of his brand-new multi-million pound facility haemorrhaging smoke, and looked to his left.

There was a short blonde woman in fatigues approaching him at high speed. He watched her impend wearily.

“Blue Eagle has come down in a residential area in Chiswick, sir,” she announced as soon as she reached him, about ninety decibels too eagerly. He struggled not to wince. “It partially damaged a mobile tower and our communications wing, but there’ve been no other reports of fires or unusual electrical outages. We’re dispatching retcon units to the neighbourhood now.”

“Yes,” he said distantly. “Right. Good work, Marion.”

She blushed all over, and seemed quite stunned by his casual use of her first name on base. He remembered, slowly, that it was the sort of thing he was supposed to be terribly uptight about – but the migraine storming inside his skull refused to cede any room for embarrassment or regret. He sighed inwardly and made an absent note to be horrified about it later.

“Thank you, Colonel,” she said. Then she stepped closer, head tilting. “Are you…all right, Sir? You look a bit…green.”

He cleared his throat. “Have you seen Greyhound Six?”

The woman tensed. She might have even looked jealous – but no, that was something he couldn’t even begin to process, not until he’d had at least nine aspirin.

“No,” she answered, tightly. “I believe Greyhound Six left about half an hour ago. She’s on leave for the rest of the week.”

“Please have her called back in immediately.”

* * *

Martha Jones had just blown past a third stop sign when her phone gave another plaintive ring.

Grinding her teeth, keeping her eyes firmly lodged on the road, she jabbed the end-call button on her steering wheel again. Nothing happened. It kept ringing. She swore mildly at it.

As if in retaliation to the profanity, the call answered itself. Her Bluetooth connected with a happy little dinging sound.

“Greyhound Six, we have a situation.”

The harried, wheezing voice of Colonel Mace burst through the car speakers at ridiculous volume, inciting a reflexive cringe. He sounded as if he had been running at full speed and was not at all coping well with the rare physical exertion. She sighed gustily and let her foot up off the gas. Tyres squealed and glistened, spitting up a gritty spray of gravel on damp asphalt as the windscreen wipers worked lazily to flick away drizzling rain. The needle on the speedometer fell backwards in what looked like relief.

“I’m certain,” she said with a tight jaw, aware of the condescension lacing her tone and the insubordination it implied but at least ten hours of decent relaxation away from being able to care about it, “that you can handle this one on your own, Colonel.”

“Blue Eagle has landed.”

These words carried enormous gravity. Any other officer at UNIT behind the wheel of a vehicle upon hearing this pronouncement would have swooned, wrecked their car, and then bailed out and started to run, falling over themselves to follow orders.

Martha rolled her eyes. Forcefully. “You don’t say,” she retorted, without humour. “You don’t need me there, Colonel. Go knock on the door, play nice, don’t stick your gun in his face: usual protocol. Explain property damage and its consequences to him, I’m sure he’ll take it well.”

“Doctor Jones.”

Her eyebrows lifted in reluctant surprise. It was strange for the Colonel to use anything but her codename over a line that wasn’t secure, let alone over a connection as woefully vulnerable as a phone call. It was also strange for him to allow even the scarcest hint of entreaty into his tone – as a man unhealthily fond of giving orders, it was no surprise that he hated having to ask for things – yet there it was, patently clear in his voice as he raised it to be heard over the din of ambient chaos around him. Martha tried not to care about that, either, with marginal success.

“Colonel,” she retorted, petulantly. “I put in my request for a leave of absence last month. As much as I love my job, I would like to at least keep up appearances of having a life outside it. I’m going home.”

She stabbed the end-call button. It refused to function.

“I understand,” Mace huffed, still regaining his breath, murmurings of loud commotion lurking under the sound of his laboured panting on the other end of the line. “Believe me, I do. But you are aware I would not exploit your expertise unless it was strictly required, doctor. The TARDIS seems to have genuinely crashed – it appears more serious than a simple case of reckless piloting. I’m on the scene now with a backup squadron and retcon units. We would have waited for you, had you answered your phone twenty minutes ago.”

“Why, exactly, do you need a _backup squadron_ for the Doctor? What’s he going to do, Colonel? Talk you all to death?”

“The exact nature of the situation,” he cleared his throat, and in her mind’s eye she could see him standing stiffer with discomfort, “has not yet been determined.”

“I thought you said you had a visual. Haven’t you seen him?”

“Yes – well. I think.”

“You _think_ you’ve seen him,” she repeated slowly.

There was a short and awkward silence. Her car rolled into a full stop, engine idling. Martha reached for the canteen of stale coffee lodged in her cupholder, and took a very long draw from it, grimacing. Then she sat back in her seat and rubbed at her eyes.

“All right. I’ll be there soon. Just tell me what’s going on.”

“I…I, er…” The stammering was unprecedented from the normally-imperturbable Mace. “At this time,” he hedged, “it is not possible to, er, ascertain…comprehensive analysis will be necessary to…”

“You’re scaring me,” she said, very seriously. “Are you about to ask me if I’m sitting down? Because that feels like where this conversation is headed. Please tell me he's still in one piece.”

“No. I mean - yes. The crash wasn't fatal. However, we’ve employed a battering ram to gain entry to the TARDIS and –”

Martha sat up straight in her seat. “I’m sorry, you’ve _what_?”

“The internal of the dimensions of the ship seemed to have destabilised. We initiated a rescue mission and recovered his companion.”

“Donna?” she demanded, heart racing. “It’s still Donna, right? Is she okay?”

“She is physically uninjured, although she is exhibiting…considerable hostility, at the moment, with our interrogator. There could be psychological damage, it’s not something we’re ruling out.”

“Why the hell is she being interrogated? _Where_ is the Doctor?”

Again, Mace fell into a fit of hemming and hawing, tripping over every other word in a butchered attempt at a coherent answer. But Martha’s attention had been taken by something else in the background: slightly louder than the ambient voices, yet just distant enough to almost be buried in static.

“Colonel,” she interrupted, frowning slowly, “why do I hear a child crying?”

* * *

In a dark, cold, upside-down dimension, Donna Noble had been desperately attempting to soothe a toddler. Her mother, naturally, had been standing right outside this dimension, doing her darndest to beat down its door with the head of a spade. It is entirely possible that, without outside intervention, these curious events would have continued without end, cycling infinitely, twisting into a beautifully timeless loop of red-faced crying and panicked lullabies and unfettered, spade-wielding rage.

Instead, the military showed up just in time to ruin everything, as per usual.

The door to the TARDIS – which the Doctor had once deemed ‘impenetrable’, in the sort of smug, lofty tone that made Donna want to kick him in the knee – splintered inwards with shocking force.

She was attempting, as best she could, to hide. All things considered, it was rather a pointless effort – especially as a writhing armful of screaming toddler was the sort of thing that gave away one’s hiding spot rather quickly.

“Shh, it’s okay, it’s _okay_ ,” she hissed at him, frantically. “Shut up, _please_ , Doctor.”

Donna recognised that she was partly responsible. Even if he hadn’t at all grasped the meaning of “ _We’ll starve to death_ ” – which, in retrospect, she appreciated was probably not the best way to go about reassuring anyone, no matter their age – the tone of her voice had obviously conveyed enough to upset him. The loud, dull hammering on the door wasn’t helping matters. Neither, it seemed, was Donna herself.

He thrashed in her arms and kicked helplessly and wailed in the shrillest voice Donna had ever heard, wailed himself hoarse, wailed as if being held by her was the worst, most hateful agony imaginable. The timid little hiding-in-shirt facade had fallen away as soon as she’d tried to pick him up. Perhaps it was mildly warranted; in her panic, she _had_ dragged him off the floor quite forcefully, as the ominous pounding outside had intensified. Although it wasn’t as if she hadn’t paid a price for manhandling him. When she’d gone to lift him into her arms, making him cry harder and squirm to be put down, she had tried to console him with a hasty, “It’s okay, it’s me, your mate, Donna, don’t you remember me?”

He hadn’t, as evidenced a moment later when his protests turned violent.

As the door was attacked, there’d been no time to convince him, no time to try to placate him. Prying him up had left her torso and several internal organs, generously bruised. Dodging kicking bare feet and alarmingly vicious small fists, eventually Donna had dragged him up into what she’d intended to be a comforting embrace but under the circumstances had ended up as something a bit closer to a full nelson.

Now, she was gripping him tight, huddled out of sight in the thick darkness behind the bulk of a coral strut – trying, by any means necessary, to shut him up.

She felt like she ought to have known what to do in this situation, but it was becoming increasingly obvious she had no idea how to proceed. There were some things Donna remembered, albeit vaguely, from her time in the Library’s computer. She’d knew she’d had children in that dream world, and knew she had been an excellent mum. But now she was learning the hard way that the fabricated experience had _not_ prepared her to manage a child in the real world. Her children had been obedient, angelic little strings of code, who played games and rarely fought and went to bed on time. Children who only cried (at inoffensive volume) when there was a clear and easily resolvable reason to: a skinned knee to kiss better, a fallen apple slice to replace.

Not real children. Certainly not mad Time Lord children, who were, as she had learned the hard way, inclined to viciously biting in response to poorly-hummed lullabies. Right now, she was terribly out of her depth.

Dust and wood chippings rained from above as the doors caved. Donna winced, braced for the oncoming pain, and clamped her hand over the Doctor’s mouth to silence him.

As his little teeth began whittling into her palm with astonishing savagery, she fretted, stiff with fear, over what exactly had just gotten into the TARDIS. It could have been anything in the universe, she thought – they could have been anywhere. Anything powerful enough to break into the TARDIS had to mean business. God only knew what nightmares were about to descend on them.

“You tell him to get _out_ of there!”

The bellow came from outside.

Donna couldn’t believe it.

“You tell him to come out that box, right now! He’s been hiding from me – he knows he’s destroyed my garden! But I’ll have him! I will! He’s not flying away before I get him! You bring him out of there! And Donna too!”

Her eyes were widening in absolute disbelief.

“ _Mum_?”

Donna let go of the Doctor and scrambled out from her hiding spot, peering up to the open TARDIS door. She could see the backs of uniforms, shadowed in the daylight. There were four men, all gently trying to calm her red-faced, nightgown clad mother who was – for some bizarrely unknown reason – holding a horribly dented spade over her head like a battleaxe.

She was on Earth.

Upon further inspection of the landscape: the clouds, the line of the roof, the evidence of a horribly maintained plot of petunias – _she was in her own backyard._

Again, Donna considered the very comforting possibility that she was unconscious from the fall, and somewhere, in reality, the Doctor, at the proper age and size, was tapping her cheek impatiently, trying to bring her round.

“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “There’s no way. All of the universe, anywhere with gravity, any planet…there’s just _no_ way.” She looked to the Doctor sharply. “Did _you_ do this?”

He was struggling for breath, wrapped protectively in his shirt, sniffling hard and glaring at her with absolute murder in his wet, red eyes. It didn’t seem like he had any inclination to interact with her - not so long as he was unarmed, at least - so Donna occupied herself with staring up at the door incredulously instead.

A stirring of movement came from above. There was metal clanking, Velcro crackling, boots clomping. The soldiers shifted and Sylvia was ushered back – although far from willingly, if her distant squawks of fury were any indication – and then the dusty blue-white beam of a torch swept into the TARDIS, flickering around the upturned console room, gleaming and glancing off the roundels.

“…seems to be inverted,” she heard a strong Irish brogue mutter confusedly. The analysis was followed by the sharp, high whine of a sliding rope. The shaft of light fell closer, making Donna shield her eyes with her palm.

“Doctor, sir?” called the brogue, quite politely. “Are you down there? Are you all right?”

“Who’re you?” replied Donna warily.

The rope squealed closer and a soldier strapped into a harness materialised from the darkness, landing gingerly on the wire-strewn ceiling. He swung his torch at Donna.

“Oi! Would you mind not blinding me with that!”

Startled, he swiftly lowered it. Grimacing, spots still dancing in her eyes, Donna scanned him from head to toe: taking in the red beret, the black bulk of the uniform, the gun in the holster. In the dark she could see anxious sweat on his brow. An extra harness hung limply from his gloved hand.

“You’re with that UNIT lot,” she said slowly.

“Er. Yes, that’s correct.” He cast his torch around worriedly, scanning the dark time machine. “Uh…”

“Do you usually go around breaking into other people’s property like madmen?” she demanded.

He coughed a little and brushed his sweat with his forearm, seeming desperately uncomfortable. “Uh. Well. The TARDIS crashed quite violently, miss. In the event of a Code 9, if contact is not made within the designated time period then…it is protocol to ensure...no severe injuries have been…”

At which point he caught sight of the Doctor, fell silent, and stared blankly as the image entirely failed to compute.

Static exploded on his radio, breaking his trance. He fumbled at it. “Er…Donna Noble, sir,” was what he eventually stammered into the receiver, uneasily straightening his beret. “And, uh…an unidentified minor. Yes. Yes, Donna Noble.”

The swift tones of an order came through the radio. He snapped himself out of his shock and into a nervous salute, attention leaping to Donna.

“Well, thank you,” she sniffed primly, inwardly delighted by the gesture. “Is that for me?” She pointed at the harness.

“Uh,” he said once more, and looked down helplessly at the harness as though he’d forgotten he was holding it. “Actually…”

“Well, give it here, then. What sort of rescue do you call this?”

With no other recourse, he handed it over.

“Um,” he hedged.

Donna sighed and turned. The Doctor – sitting unmoving in the shadows, glaring viciously at both her and the young UNIT soldier as though regarding the absolute scum of the universe – recoiled at her approach. She bit the bullet and heaved him up anyway.

He screeched. The soldier nearly fell down in pure shock, hand fumbling reflexively at his holster.

“I know you’re going to ask,” she said, tucking the kicking, whining Time Lord firmly under one arm as she strapped her legs into the harness. “So, go on. Spit it out already.”

There was an awkward, apprehensive moment, during which the elephant in the room was magnificently shrill.

“…Miss Noble?”

“Yep,” she sighed.

A hefty, uncertain pause followed, in which he seemed to brace himself, unable to take his eyes from the raging toddler.

“Where is the Doctor?”

Donna raised a pointed eyebrow. “Where do you think?”


End file.
